After procrastinating Xmas shopping for a while, I finally got to it and completed in an hour. Union Square is the perfect holiday shopping destination, as far as I’m concerned. The non-mall! This time of year, it’s got a red and white tent city of crafts shops. Lots of local artists sell their wares and do quite well, it seems. Surrounding the Square, you have Virgin Megastore and Barnes & Noble, for your non-craft needs. Circuit City and the Wiz, Toys ‘R’ Us, too… And what’s a better way to celebrate your purchase from the Williamsburg ceramicist, then by sharing a table at Republic with strangers and slurping down some salmon, taro and noodles in coconut broth? Yes, I do adore Union Square. I can hardly believe a Whole Foods is going in there too. It’s going to be like my personal shopping heaven on earth….

In some brief surfing before volleyball today, I saw that Zeldman made some notes about Oxygen’s new site. I want to reply and defend our work on the site, but in the design process, I weighed in with the same criticisms he has. I think the pages should validate. And I think our browser detection should be based on document.getElementById().

But the way he describes the browser detection we do is wrong. First off, we don’t exclude anyone, we just message certain popular browsers that we know we’re not testing against. Specifically IE <5 and Netscape/Mozilla <5. There was a bug at launch that improperly cached this browser detection across different user sessions. Needless to say that was fixed pretty rapidly.

It’s also a little weird that Zeldman’s hat tip to Bill Mason doesn’t note that Bill used to work for one of Oxygen’s former web properties, ThriveOnline. I’m not sure if it was Jeffrey or Bill who decided to exclude that tidbit, or if it’s even relevant, but I personally found it lacking.

Anyhow, I’ll bring it up at the office. Perhaps it can inspire some good in the movement towards web standards. This site validates, BTW, as do all the recent freelance sites I’ve built.

But enough on the shopping and geekiness, it’s time to curl up with my sweetie and the Sunday crossword puzzle!

UPDATE: After some investigation, I found that there was a problem with Mozilla users being messaged improperly. It’s a result of .NET’s Browser object labeling all Mozilla releases as “Netscape”. That’s fixed now, so the site only messages pre-7 users of Netscape and let’s savvy Mozilla users fend for themselves message-free. I’d still prefer features-based detection, as Zeldman suggests, but we don’t have the staff to test against a very wide variety of browsers. Or so goes the reasoning at the office, anyway.